DUBLIN – A picture by the Irish folk artist James Dixon soared above estimate to bring a record sum at Adam’s Auctioneers on April 16.
James Dixon (1921-2006) – a native of Tory Island, the isolated spit of land off the northwest coast of Ireland – worked for most of his life as a tenant farmer and a fisherman, only beginning to paint during the 1950s. Like British fisherman and artist Alfred Wallis (1855-1942), he was largely self-taught and preferred boat paint to oils and board and paper to canvas. Although ‘discovered’ in the early 1960s by the English artist Derek Hill (1916-2000), he continued to paint with brushes he made himself from donkey hair. In 1999 and 2000, his work was exhibited at both the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, and Tate St Ives in England in the show Two Artists: James Dixon and Alfred Wallis.
The picture that led the Adam’s sale, titled Irish Vernacular, was relatively large at 22in by 2ft 6in (55 by 76cm) and showed the famous tea clipper Cutty Sark set against an expanse of blue sea. Akin to many Dixon works, it was accompanied by a full description in the bottom right-hand corner of the composition, which read ‘Cutty Sark, the famous British Windjammer by James Dixon,’ with the date obscured beneath the frame. It was among the works exhibited by London gallery Desmond Fine Art in July 1990 at a show titled Contemporary Artists from Ireland.
Estimated at €8,000-€12,000 ($8,535-$12,800), it hammered for €36,000 ($38,395) and sold for €40,800 ($43,510) with buyer’s premium, seemingly the highest price for Dixon at auction. The previous high was the £9,500 ($11,755) paid for a picture of the same size titled The First Fleetwood Trawler that Ever Fish Back of Tory Island that was dated ’18 01 1968′. It sold at Cheffins in Cambridge in February 2020, having been acquired by the vendor at one of Dixon’s first commercial exhibitions at the Portal Gallery in London in 1968.
LADENBURG, Germany – Doll collectors sit up and take notice when a Chevrot-era Bru JNE French Bebe doll comes to market. That was certainly the case when one was offered in Ladenburger Spielzeugauktion’s Antique Toy Auction, held April 13.
A truly fine example hand-assembled by company leader Leon Casimir Bru and his wife Appolyne around 1884, the Bru JNE boasted elaborate costuming by Appolyne with a head masterfully sculpted by their designer R. Barrios. As the notes detailed, the doll featured ‘a bisque porcelain breast plate that is bordered with leather with suggested childish breasts, fix-inset blue paperweight eyes, closed mouth with defined spacing, slightly modelled tongue, very distinct upper lip, shaded lips and delicate outer contours, pierced earlobes, original leather body in Chevrot-style with jointed hip and wooden feet, bisque forearms and hands, blond curly mohair wig on an original cork cover, red earring, elaborate red original silk dress, with suitable hood and umbrella for stroll, red socks, red original shoes with marking Bru Jne 9.’
Considered by the house to be generally excellent, it did note that the doll’s right thumb was inconspicuously restored. Collectors didn’t care. Estimated at €6,500-€13,000 ($6,910-$13,820), dozens of bids sent the final hammer to €65,000 ($69,230), or €80,600 ($85,890) with buyer’s premium.
AUSTIN, TX – Leading the April 12 sale of the Sam Westfall collection of antique cameras and magic lanterns at Austin Auction Gallery was an early French camera lens – the Cone Centralisateur. This petzval design, with a large cone in the rear to avoid reflections, was the flagship lens of instrument-maker Theodore Jean Jamin and his business partner Darlot Alphonse. First sold in 1854, it offered better optical quality than most of its rivals, and could be used as both a portrait and a landscape lens.
Most examples carry the names of both Jamin and Darlot (who assumed control of the business in the early 1860s) or just the name Darlot. However, this one signed only for Jamin and his workshop at 14 Rue Chapon, Paris has the early serial number 1730, dating it to the mid-1850s. Estimated at $600-$800, it sold for $6,350 with buyer’s premium.
ROME – Current collecting taste means that Old Master paintings exploring the darker side of the human character can often find more admirers than more typical subject matter of Georgian gentleman or European landscapes. Works of the grotesque are particularly popular.
Bertolami Fine Arts’ April 18 sale titled Old Master & 19th Century Paintings included an intriguing 18th-century Italian oil on panel depicting eight gurning heads, along with a cat, a snake, and two birds. Estimated at €1,300-€2,500 ($1,385-$2,665), it hammered for €57,500 ($61,335) and sold for €73,025 ($77,895) with buyer’s premium.
The cataloging suggested the 18 by 21in (46 by 53cm) image may depict the Seven Deadly Sins – pride, wrath, greed, lust, et al – but it is more probably an exercise in the pseudoscience of physiognomy, or what the French artist Charles Le Brun called ‘the passions.’
In his hugely influential 1698 treatise Méthode pour apprendre à dessiner les passions (Method for learning to draw passions), Le Brun outlined the various facial expressions and the complex geometry of the skull, which he believed revealed the faculties of the spirit and the condition of the soul. Several of the heads in this composition appear to be based on Le Brun’s engravings, which for nearly two centuries provided the textbook illustrations of human emotion.
LOS ANGELES – Abell’s April 17 sale included a spectacular Art Nouveau vase from the workshop of French ceramicist Clement Massier – this 2ft (61cm) high vessel decorated with iridescent violet and purple bats in flight against a ground of pine needles. It appeared at auction as part of the collection of Toni Lynn Russo, one-time wife of legendary lyricist Bernie Taupin.
Many of the best Massier luster pieces were designed by the Symbolist painter Lucian Lévy-Dhurmer, who served as artistic director of the studio at Golfe-Juan near Cannes, France between 1880 and 1895. They were sold from a salon in Paris opened around the turn of the 20th century.
This large vase was not in perfect condition. There were several stable hairline cracks throughout its body and evidence of professional repairs to its mouth and neck. However, modestly estimated at $1,000-$2,000, it hammered for $16,000 and sold for $20,480 with buyer’s premium.
